The Great Lakes, depicted here on a 300 m image of 26 September 2014, are a series of interconnected freshwater lakes located in northeastern North America at the Canada–United States border. They consist of Lake Superior, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario and have a total area of about 244,000 km². The Lakes connect to the Atlantic Ocean through the Saint Lawrence River. They originated from the latest glacial era and were worn off by the land ice that was covering the North-American continent.